Pulse oximetry is typically used to measure various blood flow characteristics including, but not limited to, the blood oxygen saturation of hemoglobin in arterial blood, the volume of individual blood pulsations supplying the tissue, and the rate of blood pulsations corresponding to each heartbeat of a patient. Measurement of these characteristics has been accomplished by use of a non-invasive sensor that passes light through a portion of a patient's blood perfused tissue and photo-electrically senses the absorption and scattering of light in such tissue. The amount of light absorbed is then used to estimate the amount of blood constituent in the tissue. The “pulse” in pulse oximetry comes from the time varying amount of arterial blood in the tissue during the cardiac cycle. The signal processed from the sensed optical signal is a familiar plethysmographic waveform due to cycling light attenuation.
To estimate blood oxygen saturation of a patient, conventional two-wavelength pulse oximeters emit light from two light emitting diodes (LEDs) into a pulsatile tissue bed and collect the transmitted light with a photodiode (or photo-detector) positioned on an opposite surface (i.e., for transmission pulse oximetry) or an adjacent surface (i.e., for reflectance pulse oximetry). One of the two LEDs' primary wavelength is selected at a point in the electromagnetic spectrum where the absorption of oxyhemoglobin (HbO2) differs from the absorption of reduced hemoglobin (Hb). The second of the two LEDs' wavelength is selected at a different point in the spectrum where the absorption of Hb and HbO2 differs from those at the first wavelength. Commercial pulse oximeters typically utilize one wavelength in the near red part of the visible spectrum near 660 nanometers (nm) and one in the near infrared (IR) part of the spectrum in the range of 880-940 nm. The amount of transmitted light passed through the tissue will vary in accordance with the changing amount of blood constituent in the tissue and the related light absorption.
An encoding mechanism is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,700,708, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. This mechanism relates to an optical oximeter probe which uses a pair of light emitting diodes (LEDs) to direct light through blood perfused tissue, with a detector picking up light which has not been absorbed by the tissue. The operation depends upon knowing the wavelength of the LEDs. Since the wavelength of LEDs can vary, a coding resistor is placed in the probe with the value of the resistor corresponding to the actual wavelength of at least one of the LEDs. When the oximeter instrument is turned on, it first applies a current to the coding resistor and measures the voltage to determine the value of the resistor and thus the value of the wavelength of the LED in the probe.
Oxygen saturation can be estimated using various techniques. In one common technique, the photo-current generated by the photo-detector is conditioned and processed to determine the modulation ratio of the red to infrared signals. This modulation ratio has been observed to correlate well to arterial oxygen saturation. The pulse oximeters and sensors are empirically calibrated by measuring the modulation ratio over a range of in vivo measured arterial oxygen saturations (SaO2) on a set of patients, healthy volunteers, or animals. The observed correlation is used in an inverse manner to estimate blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) based on the measured value of modulation ratios of a patient. The estimation of oxygen saturation using modulation ratios is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,853,364, entitled “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ESTIMATING PHYSIOLOGICAL PARAMETERS USING MODEL-BASED ADAPTIVE FILTERING”, issued Dec. 29, 1998, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,911,167, entitled “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DETECTING OPTICAL PULSES”, issued Mar. 27, 1990. The relationship between oxygen saturation and modulation ratio is further described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,645,059, entitled “MEDICAL SENSOR WITH MODULATED ENCODING SCHEME,” issued Jul. 8, 1997. All three patents are assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated herein by reference.
Nellcor U.S. Pat. No. 5,645,059, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference, teaches coding information in sensor memory used to provide pulse modulated signal, to indicate the type of sensor (finger, nose), the wavelength of a second LED, the number of LEDs, the numerical correction terms to the standard curves, and an identifier of the manufacturer.
The LEDs and photo-detector are typically housed in a reusable or disposable oximeter sensor that couples to the pulse oximeter electronics and the display unit (hereinafter referred to as the monitor). The sensors are often connected to patients for long periods of time. Conventionally, historical physiological data for the patient is collected, if at all, by the monitor coupled to the sensor. The historical data can be valuable to a clinician or medical personnel for diagnostic and monitoring purposes. Patients are often moved to various locations during treatment. For example, a patient may be picked up in an ambulance, delivered to an emergency room, moved to an operating room, transferred to a surgical recovery room, transferred to an intensive care unit, and then moved to a nursing floor or other locations. Thus, the patient may be moved between various locations within the same hospital, or between different hospitals. In many instances, the sensor employed to monitor the condition of the patient is adhesive in its attachment and remains with the patient. The monitors, however, are typically local to particular locations within a facility or vehicle. The sensor is normally disconnected from the monitor at a departure site and reconnected to another monitor at a destination site. Consequently, any patient related data (e.g., historical physiological data) collected by the monitor at the departure site is normally unavailable to the clinician attending the patient at the destination site.